Thanks for the memories!

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Don't Believe the Hype

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

This film is director Walter Hill's carefully crafted tribute to Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch." The plot line is different, but the underlying theme of men who are anchored to the past and who have outlived their time on earth runs through the film and permeates every (male) character, albeit heavy-handedly at times (hence, my dinging the film down to a 9-star rating). If you like kicking back to a solid testosterone-charged action flick, you'll love this movie. If you are a student of the history and evolution of the collapse of the Hollywood studio system and the rise of independent film-making, and if you also appreciate the genius that Peckinpah demonstrated in many of his later films, I guarantee that you will find this movie to be wonderfully engaging on many levels and well worth a second viewing. With the possible exception of "Hard Times," I think that this is Walter Hill's best work to date.

(SPOILERS ALERT)A beautiful western-inspired and influenced story of Good vs. Evil set in Texas where Banteen plays a local Texas Ranger on the good side of the law trying to complicate things for Bailey's drug trafficking business, adding to the mix is a secret army operation with more than just money on its mind. I liked the premise of good against evil as a result of human choices and not supernatural or paranormal ones, and what makes this story more humanly-conditioned is the fact that back in the days Banteen and Bailey were best friends both on the wrong side of the law, and at some point one has made a choice to lead a righteous straight path and the other just stuck to his evil ways. Major Paul Hackett (Ironside) surely commits to a choice of his own in leading a group of highly trained military men of different backgrounds to rob the bank where Bailey holds his money and other conspicuous documents supposedly for the purpose of weakening Bailey's business, and that turns out in the end to be just a total cover up and lie manufactured by the Major himself. Setting this story particularly in Texas adds more western feel to the movie especially in the use of that type of shotguns and Nolte's stern yet vulnerable portrayal of a man trying his best to do the right thing yet is often faced by his dark past. The action direction is quite fitting on behalf of Hill which has been his trademark in many hit movies like The Warriors, Another 8 hrs., Red Heat ,etc..

Walter Hill's Extreme Prejudice is a larger than life piece of southern fried shoot em up pulp, that plays like a Sam Peckinpah film that's been left out in the sun too long, and has solidified into a bloody, nostalgic fossil. The characters who inhabit this sun drenched southern vista are more like weathered archetypes than actual people at first glance, but the genius of Hill is that he always subverts that initial cartoony feeling with excellent writing, pacing that demands attention, and without fail, he casts his films with character actors who give the story the painstaking, unpretentious attention it deserves. Hill has always had a way with casting, and here he composes a symphony of tough guys and gutter poetry spewing, hard boiled cowboys that leaves you feeling like a shot of whiskey marinated in a deer skin sweat lodge. Nick Nolte, just emerging from his pretty boy cocoon and into the second age of his career as a cold blooded tough guy, plays Jack Benteen, a Texas ranger attempting to rid his county of the drug pollution flooding across the Mexican border. Ironically, the front runner and kingpin of the trade is his old buddy and fellow hell raiser Cash Bailey (Powers Boothe), who has zero intention of quitting his wicked ways, even at the behest of an old friend. Boothe is an actor that the camera and mic just loves, and here he theatrically inhabits the role of Cash like a white suited scorpion with a a five o'clock shadow from hell and a voice like granite slabs making love with sandpaper. Truly a memorable villain. This drug war gone personal provides a nice 'clash of the southern American Titans' style aesthetic, as the two go head to head, with the obligatory girl of both their dreams (Maria Conchita Alonso) caught in between. Just to give the plot another shot of tequila infused adrenaline, there's a team of ex special ops mercenaries in town to pull off a mysterious heist that to this day, after at least ten views of this film, I still cannot discern what they have to do with the main plot at all. But no matter, as that sub plot gives a bunch more awesome actors a chance to flex their bulldozing tough guy chops. Michael Ironside plays their leader Paul Hackett, a snarling desert dog of a prick. Clancy Brown plays the level headed, low key bruiser. It's a youthful William Forsythe, however, who steals the show as Buck Atwater, a rowdy, rootin tootin, flippant wiseass of a merc who functions like redneck, black ops version of the joker. Rip Torn shows up as a salty county sheriff as well. All of the characters eventually get swept up in a rip roaringly violent showdown south of the border, with Nolte and Boothe's characters colliding like dusty fire and ice in an explosion of flesh shredding bullets, booze and sweat cocktails flooding the air like smog, and an old fashioned sense of Hollywood escapism, aided by Hill's commitment to not only pushing the detonator on the action, but giving the characters time to talk things out, get to know each other, and most importantly, allow us to get to know them, and actually care about their outcome, so we damn well pay attention when they get their heads blown off in a gunfight. Highly recommended.

"The only thing worse than a politician is a child molester." - Sheriff Pearson (Extreme Prejudice) Directed by Walter Hill, "Extreme Prejudice" stars Nick Nolte as Jack Benteen, a Texas Ranger who works the Mexican border. Benteen's biggest problem is Cash Bailey, a powerful crime lord who lives over in Mexico and who is responsible for a number of crimes on Jack's side of the border.Hill's script was written by John Milius ("Apocalypse Now", "Red Dawn"), so of course things quickly get political. A large portion of their film revolves around a "mission impossible" styled subplot in which a group of off-the-grid soldiers plot to take Cash out themselves. One of the great things about the script is the way Milius juggles both story arcs, and then merges them during the film's grand finale. In an age of cookie-cutter action plots, its nice to find a genre film that keeps us gripped; an hour into the film and we still don't quite know what's going on, or how things tie together.But most of all, "Extreme Prejudice" is director Walter Hill's love letter to Sam Peckinpah. The film plays like a combination of "Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia" and "The Wild Bunch", Hill serving up brutal gun fights, strained romances, slow motion squib-operas and the kind of sweltering Mexican heat that Peckinpah's best films ooze. This is a film filled with men weathered and beaten by the Texan sun, haunted by an inability to get things right and willing to lay their lives down on matters of principle. Incidentally, the character of Cash Bailey is based on Orson Welles' corrupt lawn man in "Touch of Evil". "Touch of Evil" was itself set on the Mexican border, and featured a similar cast of sweaty gringos and snarling Mexicans.7.9/10 - Hill's early films were visceral genre pictures several inches ahead of the curve. His later films, however, concede to, rather than challenge, the conventions of action cinema. This film is a bit different, though. Skip its poor first act and ignore Milius' stupid politics (the whole film is right winger's extra-judicial, "pop an immigrant" fantasy) and you have an atmospheric rift on Peckinpah's "Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia" combined with the apocalyptic ending of "The Wild Bunch".Worth one viewing.